Random thoughts on the passing scene:

When you have 90 percent of what you want, think twice before insisting on the other 10 percent.

I have never understood stuttering. Once I heard a well-known economist who stuttered spend 45 minutes singing humorous, tongue-twister songs without a slip. Yet, after he finished -- to rousing applause -- he could barely get out the words "Thank you."

The beauty of doing nothing is that you can do it perfectly. Only when you do something is it almost impossible to do it without mistakes. Therefore people who are contributing nothing to society except their constant criticisms can feel both intellectually and morally superior.

Do you ever feel like you must be invisible when you are in one of those restaurants where waiters and waitresses walk past you repeatedly without taking your order?

"We are a nation of immigrants," we are constantly reminded. We are also a nation of people with ten fingers and ten toes. Does that mean that anyone who has ten fingers and ten toes should be welcomed and given American citizenship?

Equal treatment of individuals does not mean equal treatment of behavior. That is why a polygamist is on the FBI's "most wanted" list. He is not allowed to redefine marriage to suit himself any more than the advocates of "gay marriage" are.

It is fascinating to see politicians who express outrage that the government is intercepting phone calls to and from terrorists express no outrage that all kinds of organizations on the Internet are getting all kinds of information from our personal computers all the time without our knowledge.

An e-mail from a reader says that he is going to try to pass as Mexican, adding "I don't want to pay taxes either" and "I can speak a little Spanish."

If politics were like baseball, the Republicans would be smart to trade Senator John McCain to the Democrats for Senator Joseph Lieberman, even if they had to throw in a future draft choice.

There is no substitute for love, not even sex.

At least half of the popular fallacies about economics come from assuming that economic activity is a zero-sum game, in which what is gained by someone is lost by someone else. But transactions would not continue unless both sides gained, whether in international trade, employment, or renting an apartment. Continued...